


you keep me sane

by eli_the_lion



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Apocalypse, Awkward Flirting, Daddy Issues, F/M, Feelings, Five is trying, Fluff and Angst, Height Differences, Nightmares, Number Five | The Boy Needs A Hug, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Time Travel, and he gets one, buckle your seatbelts for the emotional rollercoaster, dolores is a queen, five is short, like really awkward, watch me cha-cha slide between intentional canon divergences and things i forgot
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-25
Updated: 2020-08-31
Packaged: 2021-03-06 20:42:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,397
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26095066
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eli_the_lion/pseuds/eli_the_lion
Summary: Five was alone in the apocalypse for fifty-three days.And then he met Dolores.
Relationships: Dolores & Number Five | The Boy (Umbrella Academy), Dolores/Number Five | The Boy (Umbrella Academy)
Comments: 5
Kudos: 53





	1. shallow graves and first meetings

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Five meets Dolores.
> 
> TW for graphic descriptions of death and mentions of underage drinking.

It had been nine minutes before Five stopped screaming. After even the echoes of his voice had disappeared, he looked around and realized just how alone he was. He was alone with the ashen sky and the crackling flames and the crumbling remnants of the city that had once been his home. 

Silently, his eyes still panicked, he stared at the burning and broken pieces of the world and at the myriad colorless, dead faces among them. Silently, the dead faces stared back.

(It had been thirteen days when they started to talk. By that time, their faces were rotting and bloated, their eyes replaced with sunken sockets. Even then, Five could feel them staring at him.)

Five wanted to get out of here. He wanted to go home, and fast, because with every minute, this world felt less like a bad dream and more like a real place, a place where he was trapped. He wanted to go home, so of course he tried, in the only way that he knew how.He tried to time travel. Over and over again, he clenched his fists, focusing all his effort on the blue glow spreading around them. Over and over again, the blue glow went out. A throbbing pain spread behind his eyes, and the hot tears that ran down his face made trails in the ash and dirt that had already gathered there, and he retched into the piles of splintered wood and cobblestones at his feet.

It had been eleven hours when he passed out, and four hours after that before he woke up again, his throat dry and his head still pounding. Even before he opened his eyes, he knew from the scorching, smoky air on his face that it hadn’t been a dream. When he did open them, he saw that ash was still falling from the gray sky, and there was still rubble all around him, and the small fires among the wreckage crackled on almost calmly, as if they didn’t know that the world lay beyond repair around them. No matter how much he had wanted it to be, it hadn’t been a dream.

It had been three days when the smells of ash and smoke in the air began to be joined by the smell of rotting flesh. Five found a cloth in the smouldering debris and wrapped it around his nose and mouth. It was dirty, and it smelled of sweat and ash. He tried not to think about how there was no way he could bury everyone.

(It had been thirty-two days when he stopped noticing the smell. He wasn’t sure if he’d gotten used to it, or if there wasn’t enough left of the bodies to smell anymore. He tried not to think about it.)

It had been six days when he finished burying his siblings. He wasn’t strong enough, and the ground was too covered in debris, for him to dig real graves for them, so he had to scratch out shallow holes beneath their bodies. Then he dragged over the biggest rocks and pieces of buildings that he could over to them and built low mounds. The graves, if you could call them graves, were unmarked, but he could never forget where his siblings lay. The images of their lifeless faces, coated in ash, empty eyes staring at him, features slowly becoming unrecognizable, were burned into his memory. Burned into his nightmares.

(For a while after that, he closed the eyes of every corpse he found just as he’d closed his siblings’ eyes, hoping it would make them stop staring at him. It didn’t. He kept doing it anyway, until the faces of the corpses he found were so distorted and decayed that he was afraid their skin would crumble beneath his fingers if he tried.)

It had been thirteen days when the nightmares stopped going away when he woke up. The faces he saw changed day to day, hour to hour, minute to minute. They never disappeared, though, no matter how much he begged them, reasoned with them, or shouted at them, trying to get them to leave him alone.

Sometimes he saw the faces of his siblings as he’d seen them at breakfast the morning before he’d left.

_“Where did you go?”_

_“Why did you abandon us?”_

_“We miss you.”_

Sometimes he saw the faces of his siblings as he’d seen them later that same day, cold and devoid of life, coated in ash and surrounded by debris. 

_“You didn’t do enough.”_

_“We died because you weren’t there to save us.”_

_“You couldn’t even bury us properly.”_

Sometimes he saw Reginald’s face, strict and imposing, filled with cold anger and harsh, bitter disappointment.

_“Always the rebel, aren’t you, Number Five?”_

_“You were no great loss, at any rate.”_

_“I told you so.”_

Sometimes he just saw the faces of the hundreds of strangers who lay in the city around him, still dead but not at peace, refusing to move on.

_“What are you doing here? You don’t belong here.”_

_“We can’t rest. We can’t rest because of you.”_

_“You’re going to end up just like us.”_

No matter what faces he saw, one thing was always the same: he couldn’t save them. They were gone, gone, gone, just like everything else was gone, and it was because he’d left.

It had been twenty-one days when he was hungry enough to eat one of the cockroaches that crawled among the rancid food he was trying to salvage. He felt its slippery body crunch between its teeth, and its wiggling legs brushed against his tongue. It might have been his imagination, but he swore he could taste rotting flesh on its skin. He had to put his hand over his mouth to suppress his gag reflex. His body couldn’t spare enough energy for him to throw up.

It had been thirty-seven days when he stopped looking for Vanya’s body. He knew, from Vanya’s book, what had happened to Ben - that image had joined his other nightmares - but he’d never found out what had happened to Vanya. Almost every day, he looked into the decaying face of another small brown-haired woman, whispering, “Vanya, is that you?” He had no way of knowing, not now, when the faces of the corpses around him were beyond recognition. Even if he found Vanya, there wouldn't be enough of her left for him to recognize. It was on that thirty-seventh day that he whispered his goodbye to Vanya into the emptiness and let go of his last lingering hope that maybe, just maybe, she’d survived.

It had been forty-five days when he got drunk for the first time. He was scavenging for food when he found a bottle of wine among the battered cans, somehow unbroken and unopened. At first, his mouth twisted at the taste, but with every sip, the world got a little less harsh, a little less hopeless, a little less real. He wasn't sure if he fell asleep or blacked out, but when he woke up, his head and his stomach and his entire body ached. He told himself he’d never touch alcohol again. That was a lie.

The days started to blend together into one long, ash-filled nightmare. It never stopped when he opened his eyes in the morning, and it never faded when he closed them at night. He never quite got used to the quiet, or the emptiness, or the taste of cockroaches. 

He kept working on his equations, but the math was never right, and he began to wonder if he was going to die here.

It had been fifty-three days, and Five was still alone. It had been fifty-three days since he’d heard a friendly voice or seen a living human face.

It had been fifty-three days, and Five was losing hope.

As the red sun began to sink below the jagged horizon, Five wandered through a decimated department store, searching for food and clothing. The walls and ceiling were mostly caved in, and the floor was uneven and filled with holes. Everything was coated in a thick layer of dust and grime. 

He walked cautiously, knowing that one wrong step could cause the whole place to collapse around him. His head throbbed, and his eyes felt heavy, and the voices in his head wouldn’t stay quiet, and images kept flashing before his eyes, images that wouldn’t go away no matter how much he squinted and tried to focus. Had it been too long since he’d slept? He wondered. Then again, it wasn’t like sleep provided much rest anymore. 

_His siblings were gathering around him, young like they’d been the day he left. He could hear their lively voices, their loud laughter. He felt a sense of peace. Everything was going to be alright after all._

_They came closer. Closer. Their laughter became more menacing, and as he looked around at their faces, he saw that they were all dead. The sense of peace disappeared, replaced by horror and fear._

_“I can’t do anything more for you,” he said. “I buried you, I promise, I-”_

_They wouldn’t stop laughing. Why wouldn't they stop laughing?_

Step carefully. One foot in front of the other.

_Their faces rotted as they came closer. Closer. The skin peeled slowly away from their bones. Their clothes began to fall to pieces._

_“Go away! Leave me alone! I can’t help you-”_

_Why wouldn’t they stop laughing?_

Step carefully. One foot in front of the other.

_Five covered his face, and when he peered between their fingers, they were gone. The laughter had stopped. He looked up to see Reginald standing in front of him, his back turned._

_“You know, you’ve always been a disappointment, Number Five,” Reginald said conversationally._

_And then he turned around, and his face was rotting and dead. He laughed._

_Five screamed._

What had happened to stepping carefully?

_Something crashed in the distance._

_The world went black._

When Five opened his eyes, he was on the floor. He’d fallen. The building had collapsed around him. 

Shit. 

There could’ve been more supplies to be found in this place, and now it looked like they were buried in another layer of rubble. He was a fool. He’d been weak. He’d let Reginald get the better of him. (And it stung just as much, even if it wasn’t the real Reginald.) But none of that mattered now. 

Five stood up carefully, brushing the dirt off himself as best he could, and began to navigate his way out of the destroyed building. At least he wasn’t injured.

Then he paused, listening.

What was that?

No, it couldn’t be.

A human voice? A human scream?

Trying to stay calm, Five picked his way carefully through the debris in the direction where he’d thought he’d heard the voice.

It couldn’t be real. It had all been in his head. It had been an echo of his own scream. He couldn’t allow himself to get his hopes up.

But maybe it was real after all, because was that a human face?

Across the room, if you could still call it a room, there was a girl. She was sitting on the floor, her leg bent at an odd angle and buried in a fallen bit of ceiling. Her face was covered in ash, and her hair tumbled loose at her shoulders, and her lips were chapped bright red, and her polka-dot shirt was torn at the hem. She was human. She was real. When her eyes met Five’s, she stopped screaming, but her mouth stayed wide open in shock.

It took all of Five’s focus not to break into a run. Still choosing his steps carefully, he made his way across the room to her and crouched down across from where she was sitting. There were a million things he wanted to say, but he didn’t know any of the right words, so the two of them looked at each other in silence.

Finally, Five managed to ask, “What happened?”

It took the girl a moment to regain her voice. “I don’t know. The building started to fall again. I didn’t expect it, and-” she gestured at the ceiling piece “-I couldn’t get out in time.” Despite her calm words, there was a touch of panic in her voice, and she was biting her lip in pain.

One other person was alive in the world and he’d managed to hurt her before even meeting her. Because of course he had.

Again, there were a million things he wanted to say, but he didn’t know where to begin. All he could get out was, “That was my fault. I’m sorry. I’ll try to get you out of there.”

The girl looked at him. There was something in her blue eyes that Five couldn’t understand, like maybe she had as many unsayable things to say as he did. She said, “Thank you.”

As best he could, Five cleared away the pieces of the walls and ceiling until she was freed. Her leg still looked like it was bent at the wrong angle.

“Can you walk?” he asked. “We should get out of here in case it collapses again.”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. I think it’s broken. My leg, I mean.”

Five hesitated. The girl looked small. “I can try to carry you.”

“All right, then. It’s not like we have any other choices.”

He wrapped his arms around her, lifting her up almost easily. It felt strange, after so long alone, to have a real, living human body pressed up against his. He looked down at her, suddenly aware of how close together their faces were. Almost immediately, he turned away and cleared his throat awkwardly. 

They were both silent until a while later, when they’d gotten out of the building and back to Five’s base camp, where he set the girl down on a block of wood that he’d been using as a chair. Breathing heavily, he sat down next to her and finally looked at her again.

“I don’t think we’ve met properly,” she said. “I’m Dolores.”

‘Five.”

“Five what?”

“That’s my name.”

The corner of Dolores’ mouth quirked upwards. “Weird name.”

“Tell that to my dad.” After spending fifty-three days in this deserted world, it should have been awkward to talk to Dolores - there were no words for this situation. But somehow, it felt almost natural.

As quickly as it had appeared, Dolores’ almost-smile twisted into a wince of pain, and her calm, no-nonsense voice was back. “I think we need a splint or a cast or something for my leg. So it stays straight, I mean. Do you know anything about first aid?”

“Only a little. But...what if we used that piece of wood over there?”

“And then we could tear up a piece of clothing and tie it to make a sort of splint.”

A few minutes later, when Five had finished with the splint, he leaned back to admire his handiwork. After a long pause, Dolores said, “Thank you for all your help. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’ve barely survived this long without a broken leg, but now-” Her voice broke.

“Hey,” Five said. “Hey, don’t worry. You’re not alone anymore.”

“But you don’t even know me? You’re really going to help me- take care of me?”

“It’s my fault that you’re hurt in the first place. And if we really are the last two people on Earth, we should probably stick together.”

“That’s true. I just feel like a burden.”

“You’re not.”

“That’s nice of you to say.”

Five bit his lip. “I mean, I haven’t seen people in a while, and I just- it’s nice to have company. I’ve been...I’ve been lonely.”

“Me too.”

For a few seconds, Dolores and Five just looked at each other, unsure what to do or what to say.

And then she was hugging him, and holding him like she was never going to let go, and at first he was tense, but then he awkwardly took his hands out of his pockets and hugged her back. This wasn’t a dream, and it wasn’t a hallucination - Dolores was real and she was human and she was in his arms and suddenly those time travel equations that refused to work weren’t just to save himself anymore. They were for Dolores - Dolores with her half-smile and her blue eyes and her way of making the nightmare fade just a little. A part of Five’s heart that he’d tried his best to close off in the past fifty-three days started to feel warm again.

When she finally pulled away, Five had a determined expression on his face.

“Look, Dolores,” he said, “I know you’ve only known me for a few minutes, and you have no reason to trust me-”

“You literally saved my life. I have every reason to trust you.”

“The point is, there might be a way that I can get us out of here.”

Dolores’ face shifted into an expression of shock and confusion. “What do you mean, out of here?”

Five gestured around them, to the fallen buildings and the ash in the air and the halfway-buried corpses- almost skeletons by now. “Out of this place. Out of this apocalypse. To somewhere safe.”

“But how?”

Five cleared his throat a little self-importantly. “I can time travel.”

Now Dolores really looked shocked. There was an edge to her voice when she spoke. “Okay, what the hell? And if you can time travel, then why are you still here?”

He sighed. “As much as I hate to admit it, I’m not very good at time traveling. That’s how I got here- I time traveled here by accident, and I couldn’t get home again. But if I figure out the right math, maybe I can get home, and I think I can bring you with me.”

“Look, Five, I believe you, I promise, but this has been a really terrible explanation so far. Maybe you should go back and explain this to me from the beginning. It’s not like I don’t have time. And besides,” she winced, “I could use a distraction.”

“Well, all right, then. Have you heard of the Umbrella Academy?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks for reading! this is my first fic, so i would really appreciate comments and constructive criticism. also, i'll try my best to update this once or twice a week, but i have online school starting soon (ugh) so my schedule might be weird.
> 
> also, huge thanks to WaywardSister24601, my beta reader and probably 57% of the reason why this fic actually exists.


	2. unanswered questions and shrouded sunrises

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Five and Dolores bond, and Five doesn't want to talk about his feelings.
> 
> TW for graphic descriptions of death again, but it's fairly minor in this chapter.

When Five had finally finished with his story, Dolores was quiet. He glanced at her sideways, trying to gauge her reaction, but her eyes looked far away. After a few seconds, she seemed to snap back into reality, and she looked back at Five. “Your family sounds...different,” she said.

“Yeah, ‘different’ is one word for it.”

Dolores was silent for a moment before speaking again. “Can I ask a question? You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”

“All right.”

“It’s just that you mentioned that your siblings all have normal names. Why do you just have the number?” 

Five crossed his arms, and anger flashed across his eyes. His tone was sharp. “Maybe I didn’t want a stupid name. Did you ever think about that? Maybe I didn’t want to be like everyone else. Maybe I didn’t want to be ‘normal.’”

Dolores put her palms up. “Okay, I’m sorry, I was just wondering. I said you didn’t have to answer. You don’t have to get defensive.”

“I wasn’t being defensive,” he snapped.

“You kind of were.”

“Fine. You want to know the real reason why I don’t have a name? It’s because I don’t have to take _shit_ from Reginald Hargreeves.”

“What do you mean?”

“Dad- I mean Reginald- told Grace to give us names. It was supposed to be a birthday present, I think, if the old man even knew what those were. I wasn’t going to accept a birthday present from him.”

“But didn’t he give you your number, too?”

“That’s the thing I like about numbers. No one owns them. The number five isn’t mine, but then again it was never really his, so I can pick it up and brush it off and use it for whatever I want. If I’d let Grace give me a name, though, I’d have always known that I’d let myself accept charity from _him_. I didn’t want a name because I knew that even if I had a ‘normal’ name, I was never going to be able to be normal.”

Taking a deep breath, Dolores said, “I’m not going to pretend I understand that logic, but all of that stuff with your dad sounds like it was hard on you. If you want to talk about-”

“I don’t.” There was an edge to Five’s voice. “And he’s not really my dad.”

“It’s just...I’m sorry you had to go through that.”

Five’s eyes looked angry again. “Look, Dolores, I don’t need your pity,” he said. “I’m fine. I just don’t want to talk about it.”

“You don’t have to pretend to be fine.”

“None of this is your business. And anyways, I’ve survived alone until now. What makes you think I need you to be my therapist or something?”

“Yeah, well, I’ve survived alone in this too, in case you were going to ask. What, did you think I just spawned into existence in the middle of that department store? Because of you? Are you really that self-centered?”

“Of course I don’t think that.” Five’s tone softened a little despite the hardness in his face. “For what it’s worth, I’m really glad you’re here. I just don’t want to talk about my- about Reginald, or about my family.”

“That’s okay. I’m sorry I asked. But if you ever change your mind about that, I’m here.”

Why was she so infuriatingly calm? It was so easy to be angry at her, and yet so impossible to stay angry at her. Five took a few deep breaths before turning to Dolores and saying. “Look, the reason I don’t want to talk about it is that right now I can make it small and far away in my mind, and that’s the only way I can keep from falling apart. It has nothing to do with you.”

“You don’t owe me an explanation.”

“I’m trying to make up to you, okay? Just take it as it is.”

“Okay.”

“Do you want to tell me how you survived, now? Because I really do want to know.”

“I guess it’s only fair, considering that you’re _such_ an open book.” Dolores’ tone was teasing, but her words were hesitant, as if she wasn’t sure whether he’d react well.

“Shut up.” Despite the fact that he’d been angry only a minute before, Five found himself almost smiling.

  
  


It had been one hundred thirty-one days since the day Five time traveled when Dolores stood up again for the first time. “Look at me,” she’d said. “I won’t have to be your damsel in distress anymore.” And then she’d had to sit down again, wincing, and she’d laughed, “Never mind. I might have to be a damsel for a little longer.”

It was always easier for Dolores to make light of her injury than it was for Five. He didn’t understand why - she was the one who had to go through the pain. He still blamed himself for what had happened to her. He’d been weak, he’d let Reginald - or at least, hallucination-Reginald- get the better of him. He’d failed, and unlike the last time he’d failed, he’d hurt someone other than himself. Whenever he tried to apologize to Dolores, though, she shut him down. “You’ve saved my life a thousand times since then,” she always said. “And besides, it’s not like I’d have made it this long alone, even without a broken leg.”

It had been one hundred sixty-four days by the time Dolores could walk again without too much pain. She had started with short distances, using a piece of wood Five had found as a walking stick, but it had gotten easier as time went on, and eventually she didn’t need the stick anymore.

It had been one hundred ninety-eight days, and Dolores’ leg barely hurt anymore by now. It never healed properly, though. She would always walk with a limp, and her knee would always bend a little crookedly. 

  
  


_Five was walking alone through the halls of the Umbrella Academy. The ceilings were higher than he had remembered, and in the dim light, their arched corners were cloaked in shadows. He was very small, smaller than he’d thought he was, and his feet sank deeper into the carpet with each step. The silence was heavy in the air, sinking to the ground and pooling in the corners. “Is anyone here?” he called._

_“Here?”_

_“Here?”_

_“Here?”_

_“Here?”_

_Five’s own voice echoed back at him, more high-pitched than he’d thought his voice had ever been, before even the echoes were swallowed into the emptiness. The shadows, gathering in the corner of the room where the silence pooled, began to swirl ominously and take the shapes of misty figures. Those figures twirled together in an eerie dance, creeping closer and closer to Five. Even as the empty space around him grew smaller, the edges of the room expanded into the distance. Even the furniture began to fade into the edges of his vision, until he was standing alone in the middle of a vast expanse of deep, velvety carpet, surrounded by the dancing shadows. Five wrapped his arms around himself, holding his elbows close to his sides. The air wasn’t cold, but he was shaking._

_The shadows turned from their dance, looking at Five. As they all turned, he realized that they weren’t shadows anymore. They were the dead. Hundreds of them, their faces cold and drawn, their eyes blazing with emptiness. As he watched, they fell apart. Their skin turned to flakes and drifted away, and their bodies crumbled, and even their skeletons disintegrated into a million pieces of silvery ash and filtered onto the floor. When Five looked down, he realized that the carpet had turned to ash too, and his feet were slowly sinking into it. He looked around for something to grab onto, but there was nothing. His screams were swallowed by the silence before they even reached his own ears. The more he struggled, the faster he sank, and he could taste the rot of the ash in his mouth and he was drowning, drowning, drowning._

_Then, as he struggled wildly, he became vaguely aware of a figure leaning over him. Its face was obscured by darkness. He wanted to scream at it to go away, to leave him alone, that he was dying already, but there was no air in his lungs to scream any more. With his last strength, he tilted his head upwards to see what new phantom had come to haunt him. Why were his eyes closed?_

It was Dolores. Her face was concerned, and her hands were gently shaking his shoulders. Sitting bolt upright, Five shrugged off her hands and looked wildly around. 

“You were screaming,” Dolores said. “Nightmares?” She reached out her hand, resting it on Five’s arm, but he shoved her away.

“Don’t touch me,” he snapped. He wrapped his arms around his legs and hunched over, chin resting on his knees, staring at nothing. It wasn’t cold, but he still couldn’t stop shaking.

Dolores moved back a little, sitting cross-legged a few feet in front of Five. “I understand if you don’t want to be touched right now,” she said, “but can you breathe for me?”

He took a few deep, shuddering breaths. He squeezed his eyes shut, not sure if he was trying to block the tears or the shadows that still lingered in the edges of his vision. Neither worked. The shadows appeared just as easily on the insides of his eyelids, and tears squeezed their way through his lashes and rolled down his cheeks. He just wanted someone to hug him and tell him everything would be all right, and he knew Dolores would if he asked, but he couldn’t ask now, not seconds after pushing her away. 

“There’s nothing wrong with asking for help, you know,” Dolores said. It was almost like she knew what was going on in his head. 

“I don’t need help.”

“All right, what about this? I didn’t sleep well either. You can hug me if you want. To comfort me, I mean.”

“Is that reverse psychology or something? What kind of weird therapist are you?” Five asked. But she’d given him an out, and he took it. He hugged her and held onto her like he was never going to let go. 

Moments later, when they broke apart, Five answered the question in Dolores’ eyes before she could ask it. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Look, I’m not judging you or anything, but you don’t always have to shut me out, you know.”

“I’m not ‘shutting you out,’ I just don’t want to talk about it.” The shadows had retreated to the corners of Five’s mind, but he was still looking around nervously, afraid they would return. 

“Okay. We don’t have to talk about it.” Dolores paused. “I don’t think I’ll be able to get to sleep again. Let’s go see if we can see the sunrise.”

Most days, the sky was too hazy for the sun to be anything more than a faint glow in the distance, but they’d found that sometimes, if they climbed up onto a large block of concrete and really squinted, they could see its colors through the ash. Today, the sky might have been colored pink just a little, or maybe that was Five’s imagination, but he supposed it was the thought that counted. The night was certainly going away, so that qualified it as a sunrise.

He turned to look at Dolores, who was staring off into the horizon. “Look,” he said, “I’m...sorry for being rude to you. And for shutting you out. I just don’t really like to talk about that stuff. I don’t see the purpose.”

Sighing, Dolores said, “It’s okay. It’s just that sometimes I even care that I care, and that I’m trying to be there for you.”

“I do care, Dolores. You’re an amazing person, and you’re caring and patient and...and pretty.”

Dolores laughed incredulously as she turned to look at him.. “Are you...trying to flirt with me?”

Five crossed his arms. “No. Not at all.”

She smiled a little before looking back at the obscured sun. “Forget I ever said anything then.”

As they both looked out at the tinted sky, both of their hands rested on the concrete between them. Ever so slightly, their fingers brushed together, and before he could decide not to, Five wrapped his hand around hers. Neither of them looked at the other, but neither of them moved either. 

The red sun continued to rise slowly over the horizon, and the air grew even more scorching hot than it already was. A silence that had been comfortable in the odd hours of the morning did not hold up to the day. Five pulled away his hand almost casually, but perhaps a little too quickly. He slid off the concrete block and dusted himself off. Dolores followed suit, but the two of them just stood there looking at each other for a few seconds, not sure what to do or say.

“Has anyone ever told you how short you are?” Dolores asked, finally.

Five was annoyed. “I’m not short.”

“Oh, you are.”

“I’m not. Look, I’m barely even shorter than you are.”

“Are you standing on your tiptoes? Oh my god, you are. That’s adorable.”

“I am _not_ adorable.”

“Oh, you are.” It was then that Five’s brain chose to acknowledge how close together they were standing, and that their faces were only a few inches apart. Was it his imagination, or did her cheeks look a little flushed? His own face felt hot at the thought. Shoving his hands into his pockets, he took a few steps backward. 

Dolores raised an eyebrow. “What is it?”

Five averted his eyes, looking at his feet as he kicked a rock into a pile of larger rocks.. “It’s nothing.” Partly to hide his embarrassment, and partly just because he was trying to be funny, he said in an exaggeratedly deep voice, “Walk with me, Lady Dolores?”

“Shut up,” said Dolores. She smiled.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you for the comments, kudos, and bookmarks! it literally makes my day that someone out there actually read and enjoyed my writing.


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